Remote desktop products such as VMware® Horizon View™ allow users to remotely access virtual computing environments or “desktops.” The flexibility associated with virtual machines (scalability, portability, and the like) means that such products are highly useful for computing environments that include a large number of public computers that are accessible by a large number of different users. Such computing environments are typically present in locations such as hospitals, where many different health care workers can access personal accounts at different locations. Many other uses are of course possible.
In such computing environments, it is often the case that users logging on to any particular desktop are doing so for the first time. When a user logs on to the desktop, an operating system within the desktop accepts user credentials and searches for a user profile associated with those credentials. If the operating system does not find such a user profile, the operating system creates one. In public computing environments such as those described above, users frequently log on to computers for the first time. Thus, computers frequently have to create new profiles for users. Unfortunately, the creation of new profiles represents a significant delay that negatively impacts user experience. For these reasons, better logon techniques are needed.